Stratos X DeepCoin AMA Twitter 28.11.2023🔗︎
Welcomes🔗︎
All right. Okay, so let's get started. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to start this session. Welcome to this special Q&A session hosted by DeepCoin Exchange. I'm Akif, the Regional Growth Lead of DeepCoin. So Deepcoin established in November 2018, is a prominent player in the blockchain industry, founded by senior practitioners in the blockchain field and former executives of renowned internal companies and financial institutions. Deepcoin has garnered immense recognition in a short span of time. With over 3 million registered users and across nearly 30 countries and cumulative trading volume surpassing $1 trillion, deepcoin has emerged as a leading platform for cryptocurrency derivatives, and it's introduced around the world.
So for today, our guest is Bin Zhu, the founder and CEO of Stratos Network, a Web3 infrastructure startup. He has over 20 years of experience in software development across multiple platforms and technologies. At Stratos, Bin is leading his team of experts to build the next generation of decentralized data mesh, which enables the use of blockchain technology across traditional and future industries.
Before founding Stratos, Bin built the cloud department at Mindgeek, a big data ecosystem, leading a team on how to handle petabytes of big data for increased revenue. A tech entrepreneur at heart, Bin also co-founded Faimdata, a company providing AI solutions to identify the true single customer view.
So before we dive in at the end of our prepared Q&A, we will be selecting questions from our Twitter replies. So make sure to ask your questions for a chance to win $10 if your question is selected. Without further ado, let's dive in the world of Stratos and discover the transformative potential it holds for the blockchain ecosystem. Hi, Bin, nice to see you here. I have some questions for you, so let's get started. So, Bin, could you please tell us more about yourself and your experience?
Yeah, thank you. First of all, thank you for having me and the Stratos network in this AMA. And myself, I have more than 20 years experience in IT and software industry, work experience. I started working in this field after graduating from university. And before I started the Stratos Project, actually, I worked as a developer, database developer, backend developer, and ended up being the manager, director. Before Stratos, I also was a technical co-founder of an AI company located in Montreal, Edville. And in 2021, we decided to start the project, the Stratos.
When we started Stratos, we decided to work on decentralized infrastructure because not only me, even a lot of people in our team, are fully experienced in backend too. And we're looking for the opportunities to transfer our valuable knowledge from Web2 to Web3 and know how to solve the problem, how to fill the gap in the decentralized world.
Problems Stratos solves🔗︎
Yes. And thank you for the explanation, Bin. My questions are going on, so here we go. If you're ready. Can you tell us about Stratos? What problems do you solve in this space, especially?
Yeah. So Bitcoin was started in 2009 and the ETH in 2015 around. And we saw a lot of public chains are available and now there are more than 100 public chains. This all solved the problem of the decentralized ledger issues. Now it is going very well, but if we want to go to Web3, only using decentralized ledger, public chain, it cannot solve everything, especially the storage, computing, and later on the database, because those have been needed as fundamental functions. It's been needed by everything or dAPP or websites or any GameFi, social media, all need it.
So we think that's the gap that we need to fill in the decentralized world. So we start the storage and later on we will start working on the computing and the database. We combine them together. Eventually, we will provide fully decentralized infrastructure to everyone: people, developers, communities. They can use Stratos as something like the decentralized AWS to build their own dAPP or any use case to offer the people to play with Web3 work.
Stratos performance updates🔗︎
Yeah, sounds really interesting. And as you just mentioned, you are right, like the systems getting bigger and the storage requirement probably will be more essential to all of users. So here, I also would like to ask you my third question. So we learned that Stratos recently launched its blockchain and decentralized storage network. Can you please give us some updates about the performance of this amazing milestone?
Yeah, we launched our blockchain and decentralized storage in September after around two months of warming up. Right now we have around 357 nodes, storage nodes, are online. And these 357 nodes cross 16 countries in the world. And the total capacity is around 3 PB. And we did some internal tests. Our community members also did some benchmarks. We got a very good result. Actually, our uploading, downloading performance is even better than Google Drive. So people are using Google Drive a lot and they can upload, download the file, store the file in Google Drive.
But now, Stratos can provide a similar performance compared to Google Drive. But the difference is in Stratos network, everything you upload or everything you download, they're fully secured, you don't have to worry about the censorship and the ownership of your file always belongs to you, and that's the big difference. And with Stratos, we always give people to see, okay, this is your key, it's your content. It's not your key, not your Bitcoin. It's the same thing. But with centralized storage, you won't have that privilege.
The impossible triangle🔗︎
Yeah, thank you for the answer. And yeah. So let me ask you another question in regards to this. What is the strong point of Stratos considering that it is a decentralized system and that although it has tried to balance between security and efficiency, it is very difficult to achieve it 100% right? So what makes it different from other platforms in the point of the impossible triangle paradox?
Well, I think this is the perfect question. Yes. It's very hard to get everything perfectly. We need to compromise. When we designed the system from day one, we need to think, how can we make sure the system is secure, but also be very efficient? That's why we designed the Stratos with three different layers, and we combined three different consensuses together. The top consensus is POA, Proof of Authority is for our meta-layer, because they mainly provide very efficient consensus. They can make sure of all the meta layers, they can quickly respond to the users for any request. In the middle layer is the blockchain layer. We're using the Cosmos SDK and the PoS consensus.
And the performance is six seconds per block. And using that, we can secure our tokens, Stratos tokens. We also can secure all the people's content. Hash code will be saved there, as no one has the ability to modify, to change anything in the ledger. The lower layer, as we call the resource layer, we are using proof of traffic. That consensus is running every 10 minutes, this one is a little bit slow, but it has full scalability.
That's why right now we have more than 300 nodes, but in the future, they can support 100,000 even more nodes to run across the whole world. And that's why, touching on the impossible triangle, we have three angles, three parts. So we're using each of the consensuses, PoA, PoS, and the proof of the traffic to solve each of them and to make sure the security, the performance, and the scalability could work at the same time. So that's why three layers for us is very important to solve the impossible triangle. Yeah.
Comparison with other projects🔗︎
Yeah, it is really interesting and very exciting technology improvement from your end. Let me ask you another question quickly. So how does Stratos differentiate from the other leading storage projects like Filecoin or Arweave? You just mentioned Google Cloud, but how about these two projects? What do you say?
Yeah, this is a challenging question, to compare to the other similar projects. Yeah, I know. I use a different perspective to mention that. The first one is performance because actually what I can see is Stratos is the most efficient decentralized storage project. To be honest, up to now, we didn't see any of the other decentralized storage performance is as good as ours. We even compete with some centralized solutions. Okay, performance is better. The second thing that's important is the proof of traffic consensus. On the internet, actually, we never care about how much data it's stored. I'll give you one example: Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube, or TikTok. Now, the companies they care about, Okay, I'm the biggest company who stores the most data. No one cares. People only care about the traffic. Okay, how many users visit your website per day and how many active users always go to your website every month? That's the measurement for the internet. So because of how much data you save, it cannot come from the financial side or the other side, how much value you can contribute to the internet. I think in Web3, it's the same thing.
That's why we use it to improve the traffic. It doesn't matter how much data you save. We care about how much valuable data you save. And like the hot data you have TikTok, it's a very short video, but that video could be viewed a million, 10 million or even more times. If you're saving some useless data, for example, that other people are never interested in. It doesn't matter how much data you save. No one will come here to access them. So that's why we feel the proof of the storage from Filecoin is useful for some people, but it's not that useful for the Web3 economy because they cannot let other people access. They cannot let the people pay attention to generate the traffic. So proof of the traffic to care about and also encourage the content provider and all the miners who participate in the Stratos network, they have to be encouraged to generate the traffic. They'd be encouraged to provide good content in the Stratos network. That's why we feel our consensus makes more sense than the Filecoin proof of storage. That's one. On the other hand, we talk about the cost.
Stratos network cost is very low. Compared to the centralized system, it's probably only like 10 % or even less. But compared with other projects like AR, Arweave, our cost is probably 1/10,000 or 1/20,000. So if they cost $2,000, from Arweave's side, they probably only cost less than a dollar on Stratos. So also, compared with Arweave, our performance is much, much better than Arweave. So in this case, it doesn't matter from a consensus level or from the cost level or from how we can build some very good dAPP or use case on top of the decentralized storage. I think Stratos is one of the most reliable and efficient solutions for any developers in this field.
Use cases🔗︎
Thank you very much for this response, Bin. We just talked about performance etc, my other questions about this. With such a high performance storage network, what dApps or use cases can Stratos empower? What you mentioned above at this part here, please?
Yes. Thank you. Actually, when we started to build the Stratos, we talked to a lot of NFT projects. There are a lot of NFT projects out there. And we asked them for the requirements or some pinpoint. They said that some of the projects are using Filecoin, Arweave as the storage, but they're just using them as the backup. They're still using AWS or Google Cloud to store their data, which is requested by the end-user. Okay, that's one. So they need to make two copies. One is in a decentralized way, one is a centralized way. So we realize, okay, if we really want to make some website or dAPP work perfectly, we still need to use a centralized project because they provide very efficient performance to that dAPP or NFT project.
So right now, Stratos can provide a similar experience for a NFT project. So for that NFT project, they don't need to go to Google, AWS, and they can directly come to Stratos. They don't need to store their data on multiple platforms. They can just come here. And any of their users can access the pictures, video, audio, video for their NFTs, the Stratos can provide a similar performance like the CDN, content delivery network.
That's what they do. That's for NFTs. For the others, Stratos is a very high performance storage network. We allow people to upload videos for the content creator. But when any users want to watch the video or listen to the audio, they don't need to download it. They can directly stream the video or audio from Stratos network. There's something like TikTok or YouTube. When you watch YouTube, TikTok, you never download it. You just play it right away and the Stratos network could do that as well. So you don't need to download. You can directly stream. Every time when you stream the video, audio, yeah, also the proof of traffic starts to work. They will calculate how much traffic you generated and also calculate the reward for the miner and for the content provider.
That's one. Since the performance is important, users also can build something like the decentralized email system. They can send the content or messages from the blockchain or from other message information systems. But the important part is attachment. So they can add the attachment to the Stratos network. If they want to deliver an email attachment to their friends, they just upload that attachment to Stratos, then their friends can download the important attachment from Stratos as well.
That one could be done in a few seconds. Or, if it's a big one, it could be done in minutes. So that's also an important and secure channel to let the people feel comfortable to transfer that data between each other across the world. That could be another important use case in the future. Also, SocialFi and GameFi, they also need very efficient storage to store all the images and all the chat histories, etc. That also could be a very useful use case for Stratos as well.
Stratos mining🔗︎
Right. Thank you for the answer, Bin. My other question is how does one participate to be a miner?
When they start mining in general, they need to have very specific hardware. But we didn't ask people to have very expensive hardware to build their mining machine. We just ask people for a decent CPU and have good RAM with good bandwidth. Okay, bandwidth. Your network must have good uploading, downloading bandwidth. That's important. Then with the storage, it's good. And that's why right now, two months after mainnet launch, we already have 357 miners participating. A lot of them come from Europe, North America and Asia, China, Singapore, and a lot of countries in Europe.
Yes. I know some of them using some small data centers. I also know a lot of them just run their mining node in their house, in their condo, in their basement. That's why we don't need any particular, expensive hardware. As long as you're interested in participating in the Stratos mining, you can just purchase some general hardware, make sure your network is good, then you can start mining. And we have three tiers for mining nodes. If you don't want to spend too much money, you can participate as tier one. If you want to be a very powerful miner, you can participate as tier three, which needs better hardware.
In the future, when the enterprise or the business users are using the Stratos, the most important traffic will go to the tier three, because tier three hardware is better than tier one, tier two. So based on your budget, you can pick which tier you want to participate in. I think that is very flexible for anyone who wants to try. Thank you.
Storage data types🔗︎
Yeah, I see. Understood. My other question is, could you tell us more about how the Stratos manage different data types? For example, on structured images and videos full of similar rules, or how are they segregated? Is or could be some type of AI used for storage selection? What do you say?
Okay, actually, Stratos is open to any type of data. It doesn't matter. It's just word, Excel, or video, audio, or any other crypto data we don't pick. And also we don't pick the number of files as well. You can just upload one image or you can upload a couple of terabytes of data. It's fine. It's all working. Just when the file starts getting bigger, you take a longer time to upload and download. That's it. So the only difference is if you upload the video, we will detect, okay, this is the video.
And because like I said, Stratos network could be streaming the video directly. So when you upload the video, sometimes we will do a little bit of encoding services when you upload it. And since video will be streaming somehow for some users and the slices for the video and the slices for all the other types of the file is a little bit different. And for the video, we will slice them every 10 mb, but for the others, each slice size will be 30 mb. So that's a little bit different, but all the others are the same.
Benefits for developers🔗︎
All right. Good to know. Thank you for sharing the information. And my other question is regarding the benefits of the project. So as an infrastructure project, how can developers or builders benefit from your solution or how can they collaborate with you?
Yeah, that's a good question. We already talked to some community developers and builders in the crypto world. And as I know, a lot of builders and developers, they're looking for a reliable decentralized storage for them. And they tried some of the projects, but that was not good enough for them to build on. Now we have Stratos, we give them another option. I think some developers are excited to build something on Stratos.
Right now we have a couple of developers and they are ready to participate in our grant program and they will start to build something like, the Google Drive, they could call it Stratos Drive or something similar. They are ready to start to build that on top of Stratos. And some people, they also tried to build some decentralized YouTube or decentralized TikTok, on Stratos as well. That's what they couldn't do before. And it's not only developers and builders who will get the benefit from that. They'll finally find some use for decentralized infrastructure they could believe they can use. Also, we will launch a new program that will benefit the content creator. I know there are a lot of KOL, influencers.
They're using Twitter, they're using YouTube a lot. And all their IP, all their content belongs to Twitter and YouTube. Sometimes in the centralized system, they can just delete your content and ban your account without notifying you, but all your assets are there. So Stratos also could reward any content producer. When they upload their content, their videos, very valuable videos to Stratos so if their followers, their fans are goint to watch the video, watch anything from that influencer or KOL, this KOL, influencer, they will get rewarded. They will get a lot of reward based on the traffic they're content has created. That's very organic.
Yeah. I mean, for content creators, if they're using Stratos, they will never worry about their account being banned and they never have to worry that their content will be gone without someone notify them. That's it.
Future plans🔗︎
Thank you for the informative answer. So let's talk about your roadmap for the project. So what does Stratos plan for the future? Any other milestones in the road map to share with us right now?
We already reached our first roadmap and we delivered the blockchain and the storage. And the next roadmap, we're not rushing to deliver the computing component and the database component. The current roadmap, we really want to deliver some dAPP that will be powered by Stratos network. We also want to build some useful dAPP for the users. Also partner with developers, also partner with potential enterprise business and help them to start using Stratos and to help them to migrate from centralized storage systems to the decentralized storage system.
So we want to make sure that Stratos storage could be used not only by individual users, not only be used by the crypto world, but also could be used by traditional business users. Yeah, that's the next milestone we want to reach. Then when more and more data will be stored on the Stratos network, then we will start to launch the computing component. That will enable users to use computing power directly to process the data which already exists in the Stratos storage network.
Stratos on DeepCoin🔗︎
Thank you very much. I definitely look forward to hearing more info and realizing the roadmap from your end. Thank you very much. I would like to mention something here. Since Stratos gets listed on our Perpetual Trading Platform at 09:00 UTC today, many users might want to ask if futures trading is more profitable than spot trading. Well, there are several things to highlight actually. First of all, leverage makes futures trading extremely capital efficient. Also, secondly, our futures trading has more flexibility for long or short, which means futures contracts allow you to profit from short term price movement in either direction. So our futures contracts can also be used to protect against unexpected risk and extreme price volatility. Moreover, its robust liquidity promotes price discovery and allows traders to transact in the market quickly and efficiently. So Mr. Zhu, why does Stratos choose Deepcoin to do two initial futures listing? And any investment insights that you would like to share with us in terms of futures trading work for Stratos?
Yeah, Actually, this is the first futures listing for Stratos. Stratos tokens are listed on several exchanges, but there are no futures listings. So this is new stuff for Stratos and for ourselves. We really want to try to make more people happy and appeal to some bigger investors. They like the futures of trading and we want to let more people know us and more people to try to do a different way of trading and to get benefit from Stratos. And we also want from the futures dealing, probably we can get more liquidity and improve our liquidity as well. That's one important thing. The second thing we really want to work with Deepcoin is, recently, a lot of members from the Stratos community, they come from Europe. They're using Gate. They are using the other exchange. But because of some regulation of Europe, a lot of exchanges have left that big market. But Deepcoin, they're still providing the service to the European communities. That's important for us. So that's the other way we want to open the other door for our community members who are located in Europe.
Data security🔗︎
Right. It's really nice to hear from your end. Thank you very much. Thank you, Bin. Now let's tie things up with some fun, selected questions. Now we have Mr. Bin Zhu here ready to tackle anything. We have selected some questions from our Twitter replies. Let me get started on the first one. One of our followers asks, What mechanism have Stratos Network implemented to overcome challenges which most data storage platforms encounter, such as data vulnerability and thieves? Can you give us a breakdown on the type of data users will be able to upload on your platform? This is the first question to you.
Yeah, the first question. Actually, the problem this question mentioned is always happening in the centralized system. They always have back doors, they have another way to steal the data. Because when they break through the firewall, actually everything is there for them so easy to pick up. But for Stratos, the decentralized storage solution, when the user uploads their data, their data will be split to multiple slices, and each of the slices will be in a different location. Also their slices and other data will be encrypted.
So even regarding miners, because they store your data on their machines, even if that miner would want to steal your data, they only can get part of your data. That's one. Even if they get that data, they don't know what that data is because that data is being encoded and encrypted. So they don't know what that is. So that's why when you store your data on Stratos, there is no one that can steal it, even the host who helps you to store your data. They also cannot get your data. So we're using totally different strategies compared to the centralized system. So you don't need to worry anymore.
So okay, Don't worry about who will be watching you. Don't worry about the censorship. Don't worry about anyone can steal your data by any third-party people. The only thing you need to do: hold your private key. Then you always have the permission to access your data and also prove you are the owner of the data. The second question is what type of the data you would be able to upload? Yeah, you can upload any type of data. You can upload any size of data to Stratos.
Ongoing projects🔗︎
Thanks for the answers. Let me go through the second question. Yeah. So could you provide examples of successful projects or applications that have utilized the Stratos network for decentralized storage database and computation?
Yeah, this is a good question, but as you know, we just launched our mainnet two months ago and right now our network is in a good shape with more than 300 nodes. So we don't have any successful projects I can demo to you guys because the people just started to build on that. But I talked to some builders and they feel very comfortable using Stratos. They feel that the performance is good and it's reliable.
And we also talk to some miners, they feel very good and have a good feeling about Stratos and their network and their performance is good. So maybe in the future we will share, we will keep the Stratos communitie in the loop. Once we have a successful project launched, probably we can do another AMA to cooperate with the other project to let ourselves tell the feeling, what is the feeling to use the Stratos network? Thank you.
Story behind the name🔗︎
Right. Sounds good. And let me come up with the other question. So could you please tell us the story behind the name of Stratos Network? How did you get the inspiration to build yours? And how will this name affect people in your opinion? It's about more or less branding, right?
Yes. Actually, there are two. One is why we call it Stratos, the other one is why we want to build a Stratos network. It means why we are building that. Actually, myself and part of my team were working for one of the biggest website in the world. And in that company, I've been working for almost eight years, and we build a big infrastructure for that company. That infrastructure provides services to a hundred million users per day, and that infrastructure processes a hundred billion records per day. So we got a lot of valuable experience on how to build the system across the world.
So after that, we realized this is a very valuable experience and the knowledge we already got. Why not contribute this value and convert the knowledge from the centralized system to the decentralized system? That's why I think we're the right team to deliver a decentralized infrastructure like Stratos, that's one.
Okay, the second question, why are we call Stratos? Yeah, in this industry, people like to go to the moon, go to Mars, right? That's two. But from us, we really don't want to go so far. We can go to the stratosphere, stratosphere around the world, around the Earth, and actually protects Earth. So we think we really want to build a fully decentralized layer to cross around the Earth and the Web3 world.
Okay, anyone, they want to build the dAPP, anyone that needs decentralized infrastructure services, they can use Stratos, because Stratos just runs for you, protects you, and helps you to make everyone's lives better. That's why we cannot call it Stratosphere, the name is too long. That's why we cut the second part then we call Stratos.
Price discussion🔗︎
Right. Thanks for the answer. And so let me go through another question. Yeah, pump and dump schemes are becoming a major problem in the crypto space, which needs solving investors' hard-earned money going down the drain. So at this point, could you please tell how we'll prevent whales from manipulating the price pump and dump, ensure the price appreciates and reach for the moon? What do you say? That's a very interesting question.
Actually, I want everyone who holds the Stratos token or anyone who invested to know that Stratos is really a unique project. This is not like the other Dodge Coin or the other tokens, meme tokens. And the Stratos project is fully backed up by the technology and by the use cases. Probably for some people it is boring or for some people it's just too complicated. So we really like the Stratos community to get rich or get rewards when the Stratos network is being used by the community, by other projects.
We're using this way actually to capture the value, to add in the value to Stratos project based on our product. It's not purely based on the marketing, because we believe that a project that could be easily pumped by marketing is going to be dumped just as easily, because the marketing cannot keep the price up for too long. The marketing only can keep a couple of days, one month, let's say, then the token price will drop. But if you have a solid project, you have a solid product, and the more and more people start using your product, your price, your token price will be much stronger.
Probably they will start to risk slowly, but when they get there, they have fully valued stuff behind that to support that. If you check, you probably can check Tesla, you can check Google, you can check Amazon, stock price. So when they go up, they are very hard for them to go down, but they keep going up. Stratos really wants to go that way. Everything, all the value will be supported and behind by our good product and technology. Thank you.
Info about the Stratos team🔗︎
Thank you for your answer, Bin. And another question is here to you. Behind every great project, there is a team working hard to make it reach hits. And congratulations to the team for bringing such an amazing concept. Can you tell us more about the team in detail?
Actually, like I said, one-third of the team members, they've been working with me for a long, long time. Some members were working with me in my previous company. They believe in me. So when I started the new project, they followed me. And the other information about most of the 80, 90 % of the team members are located in Canada, mostly in Montreal and Toronto. We also have some good developers that come from Europe. And we have a couple of members overseas and we're working very closely.
After the COVID-19, all the team members are working remotely. We don't have an office right now because everyone is in their homes. We have routine meetings every day and we have a conversation every day. And everyone is very excited to be on this team, they're still trying their best to deliver a good product to our community members.
Community feedback🔗︎
It's really good to hear. And last question from our followers is that did you consider community feedback or requests during the creation of your product in order to expand on fresh ideas for your project? Like many projects fail because the target audience and clients are not understood. I would like to know who your ideal consumer is for your product.
Actually, I think we already have a very good relationship with our community. It's not only me and our co-founders and also working very closely with our community. We have communication directly in our Telegram channel. And people have any questions, have any concerns, we will always answer there as soon as possible. And also have a very good relationship with a lot of our community members. I even have a routine conversation with some members and listen to their suggestions.
And they also introduced a lot of good resources to us. They introduced other projects. They introduced some good guides and other communities to us. And we get a lot of benefits from there. And we will continue with this good relationship with the Stratos community. And later, we will open more doors and create more channels to communicate with our community. We think we already have a very strong community, and I would like to work with our community members even more and more to build a bigger and solid community relationship.
Ending🔗︎
Thank you very much for all the answers, Bin. Actually, we received a lot of questions. However, we have to be selective, right? And we select those questions, and they are very nice and intensive questions. Thank you for those questions and thank you, Bin Zhu, for your answers. We will mention who is the winner behind the questions. That's later in our Twitter account. But like I said, don't worry if your question is not selected. To celebrate the successful listing on DeepCoin, we also have prepared a generous price pool for all users, totaling up to $12,000. Simply register for a chance to win fantastic prizes, depositing funds, and definitely try to fall off the cash offer and trade to share in the prize pool up to $5,000. Moreover, inviting friends brings additional perks your way. So we look forward to introducing, participating in sharing this joy together. And again, thank you very much, Bin, for your answers, and thank you very much for all attendance. This section is going to end here. Thank you very much again for your time.
Thank you, Akif. Thank you.